No Age: "Fever Dreaming"

From Liars' "Plaster Casts of Everything" to Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Turn Into", great music videos are bursts of sound and vision that leave an indelible impression. Director's Cut is a Pitchfork News feature in which we chat with music video directors about their creations. The men and women behind the camera are often overlooked in today's YouTube era, but this feature aims to highlight their hard work while showcasing the best videos currently linking around the Internet. A little behind-the-scenes dirt couldn't hurt, too.

Much of director Patrick Daughters' work is marked by an unwavering focus. Instead of stuffing his videos with a bounty of cuts and concepts, he often hits on one (usually great) idea and executes it with perfection. With Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Maps", he highlighted Karen O's performance, while the creepy video for Depeche Mode's "Wrong" made the most of a guy trapped in a moving car. And while the worlds he creates can be harrowing or whimsical, they're always just a little bit off.

No Age's "Fever Dreaming" is no different. On the surface, the video seems pedestrian enough, just the band hanging out in a nicely furnished warehouse space. But as the camera slowly zooms in, the frame squeezes all the stuff inside of it, too. And then the edge of the frame takes on even more destructive characteristics. The video looks like another one-take marvel á la Daughters' clip for Feist's "1234" but, as we found out, it wasn't exactly that simple.

Click on to watch "Fever Dreaming" along with a making-of clip and our Q&A with the director about the whole ordeal:

No Age: "Fever Dreaming" [Director: Patrick Daughters]

Pitchfork: How did you come up with the concept for this video?

Patrick Daughters: I thought of the idea when I was doing a TV commercial. One of the actors in it was so big that his head was outside of the frame. I thought it was funny but we had to shoot it over and over because the company people didn't want his head to be cut off. Sarcastically, I said to my producer, "Yeah, because if we don't see his head, there's good evidence that he's been beheaded." Then I was like, "Oh, wait a minute. What if everything outside of the frame got cut off? What if the frame had some sort of physical properties?"

Pitchfork: How did you end up demolishing all that stuff?

PD: Our special effects technician, Kelly Kerby, built the machines that destroyed everything-- they're vertical steel axle columns with bike chains attached to them. They were rotating at several hundred RPMs so anything that got within two or three feet of them just got pulverized. He called them chain flails; they're pretty amazing.

Pitchfork: That sounds dangerous.

PD: Well, safety-wise, only the guy who was operating them was allowed to be in the room while they were on in case something happened and one of the chains broke off. And even he was 20 feet away from them behind a reinforced wood shack-- with a helmet on.

Pitchfork: So you added the band separately?

PD: Yeah, we couldn't have them anywhere near the chain flail. If something went wrong they could've died. And that would've been really bad. So we shot the band first and included a bunch of interactive stuff like debris flying in and some blood when Dean's hand gets ripped off. We did motion control so the camera movement would always be exactly the same for every take.

Watch a "Fever Dreaming" making-of video:

Pitchfork: I like how you may have to watch this video a few times to understand it, even though it's relatively slow.

PD: Yeah, I like the deliberate pace at the beginning because it's so opposite to what the song sounds like; you'd expect it to be really cut-y, but I like the non-sexiness of slowness. Some people thought the beginning was boring, but I don't really care. At this point, most people engage with videos like, "OK, I get it-- next!" Whereas this one is more, "OK, how is that happening?"

Pitchfork: As someone who's made popular videos in both the TV and Internet eras, do you feel that doing videos now is somehow lesser since they won't be on TV?

PD: I don't know if this is a "grass is always greener" thing, but it feels like that Spike Jonze/Michel Gondry era was more focused. Back then, there was still a lot of money in the music industry and they were letting really unbelievably talented and creative people do what they wanted with that money.

It's hard to say if that has to do with how videos aren't on television anymore. It's probably more to do with the fact that there's more media out there and the demise of the old music industry. Making videos isn't a viable way to make a living anymore, so the only reason to do it is if it's really exciting creatively. Nowadays, doing commercials allows me to only do videos I want to do exactly how I want to do them.